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This is the Classical Astronomy Update, an email newsletter especially
for Christian homeschool families (though everyone is welcome!)
Please feel free to share this with any interested friends.
IN THIS UPDATE:
- Announcements
- Signs & Seasons Sale - Only 24 Hours Remaining!
- Robot Cockroaches - Your Tax Dollars at Work
- Dance of the Planets
- Still More about "Holly's Comet"
- Astronomical Topics
Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High:
And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee,
and thou shalt glorify me. - Psalm 50:14-15
Welcome to the Classical Astronomy Update!
Hello Friends,
Many thanks to everyone who responded to our Christmas sale for our Signs & Seasons curriculum. We are very grateful for your kind support and your vote of confidence for our fledgling business. Thanks for your help in maintaining the Classical Astronomy Update and website into 2008.
Moreover, we pray that you and your family will discover the LORD's sky and learn to appreciate the wisdom and understanding the LORD has concealed above our heads. We pray over each and every order, that your family will be blessed. Please drop us a line and let us know what your family discovers in the sky through Signs & Seasons.
Announcements
Signs & Seasons Sale -- Only 24 Hours Remaining!
Folks, it's not too late to save 25% on our Signs & Seasons astronomy curriculum! This offer still runs until midnight Saturday, November 24, 2007! Save ten bucks off the regular list price of $39.99, and get Signs & Seasons for only $29.99, plus $5.00 shipping and handling! Wow, what a deal!
In case you missed it, please read the detailed description of this sale, with links to samples from the book and a table of contents, along with a lengthy list of endorsements from homeschool authors, homeschool magazines, and homeschool moms!
Order online at our website using PayPal or use our mail order form to send a check. But please act now, this sale ends at midnight tomorrow and all mail orders must be postmarked on or before Saturday, November 24!
Thanks again to all who ordered Signs & Seasons, we hope your family will be blessed!
Make 2008 the Year that Your Family Studies Astronomy!
Robot Cockroaches - Your Tax Dollars at Work
Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction! Here's a Yahoo news story about how researchers are using robot cockroaches to study to the real thing. Here's still more proof that government science grants really are "welfare for smart people"!!! I can picture these tye-died hippie scientist types, sitting around all day shooting spitballs at each other, dreaming up new ways to justify the 10 years they spent working on those fancy graduate degrees! Robot roaches -- there's gotta be a B-movie storyline in that!
As for me and my house, I personally don't care what they learn about cockroaches, unless they figure out better ways to kill the nasty critters! Why not develop a robot "pied piper" cockroach that leads the little vermin into the Roach Motel -- where roaches check in but don't check out! Better yet, how about a flamethrowing, seek-and-destroy cockroach robot terminator! Now that would be a good use of our tax dollars!
Dance of the Planets
Still More About "Holly's Comet"
The unexpected outburst of Comet Holmes has shaped up to be one of the biggest astronomy events in several years! Not since Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997 has a comet made headline news. While Comet Holmes is nowhere near as bright or conspicuous as the latter, it has surely broken up the monotony of an otherwise uneventful fall season.
According to this recent news story, Comet Holmes has now expanded to a diameter greater than the Sun! This little comet is now the largest object in the solar system! But please don't be troubled in any way by this news. (It's not a "sign of the end times"!) Comet Holmes is still just a tiny little iceball having only a fraction of the mass of the Sun. It's only a thin cloud of mist and dust that has expanded into a wispy "halo" around the tiny head of the comet that happens to now be larger in diameter than the Sun.
The 2007 outburst of Comet Holmes was first discovered on October 24, and it took several days afterwards to spread through the astro-grapevine and into the media. Compare that with this report from the Kendrick Family in Zimmerman, Minnesota:
Hello! And thank you for the wonderful newsletter you create. We really enjoy it! We are a Christian homeschool family of dad, mom, and three kids, ages 13, 12, and 9.
A couple weeks ago, either on October 25th or very shortly after, our 13-year-old daughter Holly was gazing at the sky with binoculars. She found the fuzzy white ball of Holmes' Comet. We all took turns looking at it and guessing what it was. I searched the internet, checked out library books with star maps, and I could not find anyone that identified anything in that spot of the sky. We looked at it each day for several days after, and guessed that it must be a galaxy since there are so many galaxies in that general area of the sky.
Tonight, my daughter reported that it had moved from where it was before, and that made it even more of a mystery, as we knew galaxies would not move. I finally decided tonight to e-mail you and ask you for help in identifying this fuzzball. I am a little ashamed to say that I had your e-mail updates in my inbox, but this busy homeschool mom hadn't found time to read them yet! I checked in the update for your e-mail address, and there you had the exact information we were looking for! It was Comet Holmes! We were so happy to finally have this identified, as it had been such a mystery. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Since my daughter "discovered" it for our family, we will be referring to it as "Holly's comet." I'd like to believe that it was a gift from God to our family, as October 25th is the day that my husband and I fell in love, 21 years ago. Seems more of a logical explanation that what most "scientists" would come up with anyway! Hee hee.
This is a really remarkable story. Holly's diligent observation of the night sky surely paid off! Certainly Holly is one of the early "rediscoverers" of Comet Holmes, and I personally do not object to her family calling it "Holly's Comet"!!! Holly certainly did a fine piece of amateur science and we'll look forward to following Holly's astronomy career with great interest!
What everyone else can learn from this is that you need to stay up to date with the Classical Astronomy Update! If you miss an edition, you just might miss a whole lot!
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Order online at our website or from one of our fine distributors.
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Astronomy Topics
Earthset over the Moon?
There was some minor buzz in the news this week about a Japanese space probe in orbit around the Moon that took some video of an "Earthset" -- where the Earth was seen to set below the lunar horizon. Still photos and the video itself can be seen in this MSNBC story.
 This "Earthset" was a reprise of the famous "Earthrise" photo and video taken in 1968 by Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon. I well remember watching the Apollo Special Report on Christmas Eve, 1968, when the world saw the first "up close" pictures of the craters of the lunar surface. During this historic moment, the astronauts -- Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders -- read a lengthy passage of the creation account from Genesis chapter 1. It was an amazing way to spend Christmas, especially for me, a seven year old at the time.
Though this week's Earthset was a minor humdrum footnote, the 1968 Earthrise rocked our world. It was the first time anyone ever saw a photo of the entire earth. The astronauts and commentators remarked how everyone who ever lived and died did so right there on that blue marble. Every mom who kissed her baby, all the great writers and scientists, Jesus and Moses, and the great saints -- everyone, everything we know, everything that ever happened, good or bad, happened right there.
The otherworldly sight of the Earth rising above the Moon's surface might be exciting and thought-provoking. However, the problem is, the Earth does not rise and set as seen from a stationary location on the Moon. The 1968 and 2007 videos were taken from moving spacecraft and it is only this motion that causes the Earth to appear to move with respect to the Moon's horizon.
In the Update article The Face on the Moon, we saw that the Moon's face (i.e. the "Man in the Moon") is continually pointed toward the Earth as the Moon goes around in its orbit. Even as the Moon moves, the relative position of the Earth in the lunar sky would not change. So if one were standing on the Moon's surface, one would see the Earth more or less stationary in the sky.
As seen from the Moon, the Sun rises and sets in a lunar "day" that takes a month! The Sun rises, reaches it's highest point a week later, and sets a week after that. The Sun then spends two weeks below the horizon during the lunar night. During this entire time, the stars would also rise and set in a one-month cycle.
Throughout this period, the unmoving Earth passes through a cycle of phases just like the Moon. As the Sun rises and sets, it approaches and draws away from the stationary Earth, and the phases of our planet would change in response to the apparent motion of the Sun. (For example, the Earth would be a waning crescent as the Sun draws near and a waxing crescent as the Sun draws away.)
The above notwithstanding, Earth would not appear totally stationary in the lunar skies. There is a phenomenon seen in the Moon called the "lunar librations," where the Man in the Moon appears to "nod up and down" and "shake his head from side to side" over the span of the month as a result of certain variations in the Moon's orbit.
As seen from the Moon, the librations would cause the Earth to appear to move back and forth in the sky or to trace circular patterns over a span of about five degrees (i.e. 2-1/2 visual diameters of the Earth.) This motion would only be obvious at lunar latitudes of about +/- five degrees from the lunar poles, where the Earth would be close to the lunar horizon. Within those latitudes, the Earth actually would rise and set, but only by bobbing up and down over the same point on the lunar horizon.
Obviously no one has ever seen the Earth bobbing around like that. We can only derive that from certain known facts. However, the ancient Greeks used a similar process of derivation to accurately infer the 24 hour sunlight at the Arctic Circle and the reversed skies of the southern hemisphere many centuries before those areas were reached by explorers. We can also do the same in calculating the appearances of the skies of other worlds.
for some astronomy cartoons on the subject.)
Coming in future Classical Astronomy Updates:
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The winter solstice approaches for celestial observers in the northern hemisphere.
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Mars will rise earlier in the morning and will soon be visible in the evening skies, approaching opposition on December 24, 2007.
Til next time, God bless and clear skies!
-jay
The Ryan Family
Cleveland, Ohio, USA
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art
mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
- Psalm 8:3,4, a Psalm of David
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